Pests, pets and prey – uncertainty in the city

Long ago, settlements and therefore latterly, cities were predicated on the concept of refuge and a physical division of culture and nature. Clearly such division has proved increasingly porous as more and more animals and birds consider concentrations of human population an attraction rather than a deterrent because of the opportunities such culture provides in terms of habitat and feeding. For some, the presence of these creatures – pigeons, starlings, rats, mice, foxes and insects is a threat of some kind, a kind of leakage and therefore a representation of the fragility of our insulation from the ‘wild’, the unpredictability and ‘chaos’ of ‘nature’. This art project, a work in progress, explores specific perceptions and limits of tolerance and ‘animal infringement’ in the city of Lancaster, building a picture of local human behaviour towards animals and the environment – of tolerance and intolerance, of fear and loathing, affection, conflict, pathos and admiration. What’s conspicuously at play is a continual conflict over territory. During our research we’ve observed ambivalence and contradictory vested interests in relation to a wide range of creatures. We have been working closely with the Pest Control Department, a division of the Council Environmental Agency in addition to individuals whose relationships to specific animals are indicative of considerable and sustained focus. Most significant is the mixture of responses, the paradoxical nature of human attitudes towards agents of ‘the wild’‚ and the implicit cohesion-in-tension of the human/nature paradigm. Is this paradoxical intertwining of detached fascination on the one hand and neurotic repulsion on the other, the inevitable architecture of an irredeemable conflict? And in the final analysis, might this irreconcilability hinge on our own ambivalence to the animal within us?